At Large and at Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist by Fadiman Anne

Author:Fadiman, Anne [Fadiman, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Humour, Adult
ISBN: 9780141903699
Amazon: B002RI9H0M
Goodreads: 19088568
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2007-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

MAIL

ome years ago, my parents lived at the top of a steep hill. In his study, my father kept a pair of binoculars with which, like a pirate captain hoisting his spyglass to scan the horizon for treasure ships, he periodically inspected the mailbox to check the position of the flag. When the mail finally arrived, he trudged down the driveway and opened the extra-large black metal box, purchased by my mother in the same accommodating spirit with which some wives buy their husbands extra-large trousers. The day’s load—a mountain of letters and about twenty pounds of review books packed in Jiffy bags, a few of which had been pierced by their angular contents and were leaking what my father called “mouse dirt”—was always tightly wedged. But he was a persistent man, and after a brief show of resistance the mail would surrender, to be carried up the hill in a tight clinch and dumped onto a gigantic desk. Until that moment, my father’s day had not truly begun.

His desk was made of steel, weighed more than a refrigerator, and bristled with bookshelves and secret drawers and sliding panels and a niche for a cedar-lined humidor. (He believed that cigar-smoking and mail-reading were natural partners, like oysters and Mus-cadet.) Several books were written on that desk, but its finest hours were devoted to sorting the mail. My father hated Sundays and holidays because there was nothing new to spread on it. Vacations were taxing, the equivalent of forced relocations to places without food. His homecomings were always followed by daylong orgies of mailopening—feast after famine—at the end of which all the letters were answered; all the bills were paid; the outgoing envelopes were affixed with stamps from a brass dispenser heavy enough to break your toe; the books and manuscripts were neatly stacked; and the empty Jiffy bags were stuffed into an enormous copper wastebasket, cheering confirmation that the process of postal digestion was complete.

“One of my unfailing minor pleasures may seem dull to more energetic souls: opening the mail,” he once wrote.

Living in an advanced industrial civilization is a kind of near-conquest over the unexpected.… Such efficiency is of course admirable. It does not, however, by its very nature afford scope to that perverse human trait, still not quite eliminated, which is pleased by the accidental. Thus to many tame citizens like me the morning mail functions as the voice of the unpredictable and keeps alive for a few minutes a day the keen sense of the unplanned and the unplannable.

What unplanned and unplannable windfalls might the day’s yield contain? My brother asked him, when he was in his nineties, what kinds of mail he liked best. “In my youth,” he replied, “a love letter. In middle age, a job offer. Today, a check.” (That was false cynicism, I think. His favorite letters were from his friends.) Whatever it was, it never came soon enough. Why were deliveries so few and so late (he frequently grumbled), when, had he

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